Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Monday, June 27, 2016

Robert
Altman’s 1978 film A Wedding, with
its absurdly farcical plot, its outlandish stereotypes, and its often
ridiculous mish-mash of American north-south sensibilities, ought to have been a disaster. Certainly, the first
time I saw this film, sometime around its original release, I felt that was the
case. But over the years I’ve become more and more fond of Altman’s excesses,
and this time around I perceived the movie as less a raucous excess and more of
a pointed satire of all the things that might happen to destroy a wedding,
beginning and ending with the deaths of the grand matriarch and the wedding
couple themselves. Today it appears more like a rollicking version of Father of the Bride or Neil Simon’s
“Visitor from Forest Hills” section of Plaza
Suite than the mess of a movie I first thought it to be. Indeed, Altman’s
work here is almost a tribute to the movies, as young one wedding-goer spouts
the plots of numerous horror films, and the director throws in several
references to film and television history even through the choices of his cast:
Gish, Gassman, Chaplin, Burnett, Arnez, Dooley, etc.

Big weddings are all embarrassing in one
way or another, as two different families and hordes of relatives and friends
all gather to drink and celebrate or possibly mourn the coming together of two
young lovers. At least, that’s the presumption of writers John Considine, Allan
F. Nicholls, Patricia Resnick, and Robert Altman. You can almost see them
sitting round a table listing all the terrible things that might logically (an
illogically) happen at such an event.

First of all, the two families must be
completely incompatible: in this case the noveau
riche southern family, the Brenners joining together with the waspish midwestern
Sloans who have already mixed blood with the Italian Corellis. The ceremony
itself, particularly when officiated by an older fumbling and bumbling,
Episcopal bishop, brought out of mothballs (as matriarch Nettie Sloan—played by
the wonderful Lillian Gish—declares) is close to chaos. Add a traditional,
slightly hysteric, possibly lesbian wedding planner (Geraldine Chaplin), who
admits early on that nearly all the guests have turned down the invitation to
the reception. Begin the entire event with the death of Nettie, and you just
know this is going to be fun.

It’s nearly impossible, and clearly
unnecessary, to list all of the events delicious goings on, which include
various highjinks of the adolescent boys and a running mob of young siblings.
When you have both a nurse and a doctor in the house you know that everyone, in
way or another, is going to get sick. As the wedding party descends upon the
mansion, nearly everyone is desperate to pee. Regina Sloan Corelli (Nina Van
Pallandt), moreover, is a drug addict; the caterer, Ingrid Hellstrom (Viveca
Lindfors) has fainting spells and, after swallowing the doctor’s pills, gets
high; the bride’s brother is epileptic; and poor Tulip Brenner (Carol Burnett)
gags at the very thought of the unwanted advances of Mack Goddard (Pat
McCormick). Later, however, after it is established that Tulip’s husband,"Snooks" Brenner (Paul Dooley), has an
incestuous crush on his beautiful but nearly mute elder daughter Buffy (Mia
Farrow) and that he regularly verbally abuses his wife, Tulip permits herself
to consider a tryst with her new admirer.

Why shouldn’t she, when nearly everyone
in the wedding party is having an affair, and several have been married
numerous times? Clarie, Regina’s sister is in love with their black butler. Two
late wedding guests, Tracy Farrell (Pam Dawber) and Wilson Briggs (Gavan
O'Herlihy), have been the previous lovers of the bride and groom; and nearly
every male at the military academy the groom attended (next door, incidentally
to the Brenner home) has slept with Buffy, whose only words in the film are
that she is pregnant with the groom’s baby. By film’s end even the gay
groomsman Captain Reedley Roots appears to engage in sex with the groom.

Then there is the wedding couple
themselves, the not so pretty Muffin Brenner (Amy Stryker) whose teeth are
still in braces and the not so smart Dino Sloan Corelli (Desi Arnaz Jr.), whose
brain, equally, is in need of straightening.

Obviously, they will soon likely be as
unhappy as everyone else. Indeed, it appears that, speeding away from the
wedding the party in their new Mercedes, they strike an oil tanker and are
killed in the fiery crash. But this is a comedy, after all, and after the
families trade their pain and anger through an old-fashioned civil war, the
couple is resurrected when the families discover they have been sleeping
upstairs, their former lovers having been the ones who have run off with their
car.

By movie’s end, at least, order is
somewhat restored. Tulip tells her would-be lover that she will not meet him in
Tallahassee, Muffin makes it with the father’s, Luigi Corelli (Vittorio
Gassman), long-lost brother, and, most importantly, Luigi, who it turns out was
a former restaurant waiter—freed at last from the dictates of Hettie—drives off
with his brother into the sunset, leaving behind the looney world in which he
has for so long been entrapped.

The real targets of Altman’s satire,
it becomes apparent, are not these absurd figures, but love and the “the estate
of holy marriage” itself. Loving and living, the director seems to argue, are
always an unholy mess. And, indeed, if one wanted to explode the metaphor, one
might suggest that movie-making, particularly given the large ensemble
groupings of Altman films, is the same kind of chaotic marriage of
larger-than-life personalities with libidos to match. Such relationships to the
auteur-father are always fraught with
every peril imaginable; but, at least, he can always drive off, like the father
of the groom, into the future, leaving the messy result of his “marriage” behind.
Perhaps only now can I understand my early reactions to this film, for it is a
kind horror film, a disaster film as well.